Dixons head office staff will begin fanning out across the country this week, to help with the Christmas rush at tills and call centres. As board directors and payroll clerks take up the company tradition of spending a week on the frontline, they should be feeling particularly festive.

The electrical retailer's stock market value has just burst through the £1bn mark for the first time since the summer of 2010. The shares have risen from a low of 10p at the beginning of 2012 to around 28p today.

This is a turnaround with bells on for a company that some feared was travelling a similar path to rival Comet, which went into administration last month. In fact, Comet's burnout may well benefit Dixons, which defied the doubters last month by repaying a £150m bond.

Chief executive Sebastian James is also reaping the benefits of changes made by predecessor John Browett, who was big on improving customer service and store design.

Browett is no longer around to take the credit: he jumped ship early this year ship to run Apple's retail stores, only to be shown the door nine months later. Let's hope he has held on to the 880,000 Dixons shares he left with. If not, the $1.7m in Apple stock he gathered during his brief stay in California should be some consolation.

WPP's moving story

Shareholders at WPP will be asked on Tuesday to approve its move to a new home. The world's largest advertising group is relocating from Dublin to London after George Osborne obliged with a tweak to the way overseas profits are taxed – most of WPP's earnings come from outside the UK.

But there is a catch. While Sir Martin Sorrell's group will keep its London Stock Exchange listing, be resident in the UK for tax purposes and hold board meetings in the capital, it will remain incorporated in Jersey.

It has good reasons for choosing the light-touch Channel Island jurisdiction. Share buybacks, which help boost stock prices, are easier and cheaper to organise from Jersey. And under its laws, dividends for overseas investors attract less tax. WPP is not the only company to have made this choice – Glencore is incorporated in Jersey despite listings in London and Hong Kong and a head office in Switzerland.

Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK is sceptical about Sorrell's move. "WPP is free to go again whenever it wishes," he says. "It is just putting its bags down in another location in its globe-trotting to avoid tax. I don't see that as a major win for the UK."

Osborne may beg to differ.

Under starter's orders at Betfair

Time for Betfair chief executive Breon Corcoran to show why he is worth every penny of his £6m golden hello. Lured from Paddy Power in August after a below-par performance at the online betting exchange, Corcoran is due to reveal his recovery plan when he announces the group's first-half results on Thursday.

It has been a bruising year: Betfair's international expansion strategy was junked, with foreign-language websites shut down, partial withdrawals from Germany and Cyprus, and the closure of its operations in Greece. Betfair's own Grexit is going to cost £13m a year in lost revenues.

Next could be disposal of its stake in financial trading platform LMax – Goldman Sachs sold its share in May. Peel Hunt analyst Nick Batram, who describes Betfair as "the forgotten company of the gaming sector", says the company is now likely to emphasise "in play" gambling – where punters place their bets during live matches – and focus on becoming more of a traditional bookie by offering a greater range of fixed odds.

Betfair has been in limbo since the departure of former chief executive David Yu 18 months ago, but after Corcoran unveils his strategic review the group will be very much "in game".